The Final Fantasy Legend

About This Game

Gameplay

In The Final Fantasy Legend, the player navigates a character throughout the game world with a party of up to four characters, exploring areas and interacting with non-player characters. Most of the game occurs in towns, castles, caves, and similar areas. To aid exploration on the field screen, the game makes use of various signs within towns. The player is initially limited to the World of Continent to explore, and given access to later worlds as his or her party climbs the Tower. Players can save their game anytime and anywhere when not in combat to a save slot for later play. Players can journey between field screen locations via the world map, a downsized representation of Final Fantasy Legend's various worlds. Players can freely navigate around the world map screen unless restricted by terrain, such as water or mountains. The goal in each world is to find the entrance to the next level of the Tower. Random enemy encounters occasionally interrupt travel across the world map screen and hostile areas, as in other Final Fantasy related games. At the beginning of the game, the player must choose a character class, gender, and name for the group's "party leader".

History

The Final Fantasy Legend was the first installment of the SaGa series in Japan and the first Game Boy game produced by Square. Square president Masafumi Miyamoto requested developers create a Game Boy game after he noticed the success of Tetris and the popularity of the handheld system. Akitoshi Kawazu and partner Koichi Ishii decided that instead of creating a game similar to Tetris, they would produce what they felt customers desired most: a role-playing game. Square's concept for the game was a title that could be completed in six to eight hours, based on the duration of an airplane flight between Narita, Japan and Honolulu, Hawaii. Developers sought to optimize the game for short bursts of gameplay, as if played by a train passenger between stations.